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Re: Reboot vs. Restart Windows


Having said that, there isn't an official way (that I'm aware of anyway)
to restart windows without restarting the system itself.  However, I do
know a little trick that is supposed to be just as good.  Open the task
manager, and find 'explorer.exe' in the process list.  Perform an
end-task on this process.  It should reload the windows system files, or
atleast thats my understanding.

It's not just as good. Like I said, the reason a restart is needed is because Windows actually overwrites DLLs that are in use during the next reboot, once they're no longer locked. When explorer.exe is reloaded, it will reload all the files, but it won't load a newer version of them, since it won't know that there IS a newer version unless you explicitly overwrite the old version while explorer is still dead. Even then, you run into issues with SPF, which, IIRC, can't be disabled in XP SP2, and XP is likely to just overwrite the new one with the old one again.

~Matt

On 10/30/06, Joey Officer <jofficer@wi.rr.com> wrote:
What you are referring to was the 'soft' restart.  If you held the SHIFT
key (either I think) during a 'Shutdown -> Restart;  it would restart
only the windows software.  This worked on all versions of windows
through windows Me! ... It does not work on any current version of
Windows, due to the fact that current versions are built around Windows
NT, which did not have a DOS foundation.  Windows 95/98/ME were
applications that ran on top of DOS, similar (atleast in concept) to the
really old Windows 3.x days (and older if you can think back that far).

Having said that, there isn't an official way (that I'm aware of anyway)
to restart windows without restarting the system itself.  However, I do
know a little trick that is supposed to be just as good.  Open the task
manager, and find 'explorer.exe' in the process list.  Perform an
end-task on this process.  It should reload the windows system files, or
atleast thats my understanding.

Good luck all.
joey


Benjamin Madore wrote: > So as to add to the confusion... > > At one point, and maybe still, you could "Restart Windows" without rebooting > your computer. If I recall correctly, it would drop to the subsystem (DOS?) > and a message stating "Restarting Windows..." would display on your screen. > > So, restarting was not necessarily rebooting at one time. I don't know how > this plays out, though, as either would do what you wanted. > > BTW, can one say they restarted Cygwin without restarting windows? Does that > make sense? > > On Mon, October 30, 2006 7:56 am, Mike Maxwell said: > >> Certainly 'reboot' is used a lot. But the standard Ms Windows message >> is 'restart Windows.' And I don't know the history, but I would not be >> surprised if the reason it started being used (around the time of Win95 >> or Win98, from what I can tell) is that it is less ambiguous--exactly >> the point I've been trying to make. >> -- >> > > > > -- > Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple > Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html > Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html > FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ > >

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